Real Value Delivered Weekly, Guaranteed

Main menu

Category Archives: Uncategorized

I get asked quite often for good sites to learn programming or web site development, here are a few resources I recommend.

freeCodeCamp – the best place to learn html, javscript and the rest of technologies necessary for front end web development, they are also working on a full stack developer course as well – can’t recommend these guys enough – a great intro to web technologies

Google has a list of resources and a guide intended for Computer Science students seeking an internship or university grad role at Google but it is useful for anyone who is interested in a software development career.

CS for All is an open book by professors at Harvey Mudd College which teaches the fundamentals of computer science using Python. It’s an accessible read and perfect for programming beginners.

This short 5 minute video explains why it’s better to think of projects you’d like to build and problems you want to solve with programming. Start working on those projects and problems rather than jumping into a specific language that’s recommended to you by a friend.

This post outlines the steps required to integrate Vuforia for Digital Eyeware with the MergeVR SDK in Unity. The result of this integration will be an Augmented Reality demo app that can be run in the MergeVR headset on your Android device. It will recognize an image marker and display a 3d object on top of that marker, and allow the user to trigger a virtual button on the object – then enter in VR mode and move around the VR scene using the MergeVR headset capactive input buttons.

Drag the MergeCameralController root transform to the ARCamera property ‘Central Anchor Point’. Drag MergeCameraRight to ‘Right Camera’ (Vuforia will pop up a box saying ‘add vuforia components’ – click for both right and left cameras), then drag the MergeCameraLeft to ‘Left Camera’

Save the Scene – now go ahead and build and run this scene on Android – you should now have a working AR app that can recognize the image stones marker and display the 3d mountain object. If you focus your gaze on the virtual ‘VR’ button for 2 seconds the app will transition you inside the full VR scene where you can look around, to exit the VR scene look straight down and focus on the ‘AR’ button for 2 seconds.

We now have a working AR/VR app – we need to make a few modifications to this scene to get it to run best in the MergeVR headset and to let us use the capactive touch buttons on the MergeVR headset to interact with the VR world.

The MergeVR headset needs the camera on the right side to work in AR mode with the Android, since the generic Vuforia demo doesn’t support this we have to make a few modifications to the MergeVR code to handle the change.

To move the viewport to the correct position when camera is on the right. Open the ‘MergeScreenManager.cs’ script in MergeVR->Scripts. In the function ‘SetViewPortResolutionAndPostion’ replace this line

viewportYpos = viewportBottom;

with

viewportYpos = viewportBottom+(Screen.height-viewportHeight);

and in the ‘MergeCameraController.cs’ script in MergeVR->Scripts comment out the following lines in the function AndroidGyroTracking

* YourTeacher.com – We continue to be the iOS app development arm for yourteacher.com. They have over thirty titles in the Apple App store – majority of which have 4.5+ average ratings with literally hundreds of thousands of downloads per app.

* Just Picture It – created in partnership with the Mason Software Company. It evolves a mobile photo sharing into a word game with friends and family. In a turn-based game you can play in single and multiplayer mode.

Just Picture It uses the Parse.com api extensively for user authentication, push notifications, and storage of games and messages.

Posted an update to the TorchShips kickstarter page – we’re at 20% with 6 days to go – added a reward tier that includes a physical copy of the game & manual – plus committed to a stretch goal – if we hit $40k I will add full modding support to TorchShips – more details available here.

TorchShips is a 3-D tactical space combat game based on real physics with procedurally generated single and multi-player missions. It will be initially released for Windows & Mac, with iOS version to follow.

If you’re interested in the game or just want to support us please link to the site, like via Facebook, and/or follow the twitter feed. We’re gearing up for a kickstarter project as well that should start within a week.

After evaluating 3d engines for iOS development I’ve decided we’re going to go with Unity3D.

I would prefer a native Objective-C engine but the ability to deliver for multiple platforms is very attractive (Unity can deploy to Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, XBox 360, and the Wii).

Unity development so far has been straight forward – scripts can be in c# or javascript – I’ve created several 3d scenes, used the extensive resources from the forum and Unity Answers to create a ship that uses realistic physics to move in orbit. The Unity Asset store has thousands of additional resources for Unity3D dev. Initially I’m using atmospheric planets and vectrosity for line drawing.

Unity3d scene

We play tested the game as turn based and real time multi-player – I was initially planning on a turn based approach using Apple’s Game Center for iOS but the game plays much better in real time. We evaluated several multi-player network solutions and are going to go with Photon Cloud – very well integrated with Unity, a great price, and should be able to scale.

We’ve had to write over a dozen server back ends for iOS applications. There is a lot of manual work involved, no matter what platform you choose (we’ve used Google App engine or custom php solutions based on Joomla). There is the code and database development on the server side, plus a lot of code on the iOS side to handle the calls to the server, error handling, etc. It’s a royal pain and something we’d like to avoid in the future if possible.

Parse is a new service that simplifies back end development for iOS immensely – it can take literally minutes to add a simple server side component to your iOS app.

Pricing is free in Beta and looks very reasonable going forward as well.

We recently used Parse to add server functionality to an iOS Math application for YourTeacher.com. The app stores user preferences to a simple Parse object. Adding Parse to our project, testing, and deploying took less than an hour. Performance is good – besides being able to save and retrieve standard dictionary objects you can use Parse to store and manipulate remote files and geo location objects.

They have a very good overview of the integration process for iOS, plus the API is available as a REST service and for the Android as well.